3 ms·

What is the use case for font-only zooming? I just tried it on a few sites and it either doesn't change much/anything or breaks stuff -- either by overlapping

• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• danShumway 6y ago
  > either by overlapping text, or not increase the width of text zones so you end up with few words per line in the middle of the screen Those the problems that I mentioned. Those problems are why you don't use pixels instead of `em` units. If you increased the font size in a PDF then columns, diagrams, and layouts would also break. But you wouldn't be surprised because you don't expect the PDF to be responsive. We expect the browser to be responsive. The use-case for font-only zooming in general is that as a designer, there are elements that should scale with the font and elements that shouldn't. Full-page scaling works by acting like the browser is just a lower resolution, so everything scales upwards except percentage units and viewport units, including things like border widths, spacing between columns, etc... Sometimes as a user that's what you want. Sometimes it's not. As a designer, it's useful to be able to have more control in the scenario where a user wants to scale only the font and not the border-width of an element to make something that genuinely feels responsive, rather than to be completely subject to a zoom method that is just pretending you're on a screen half as large and then upscaling before it renders. It's also useful because we'd like to build the web into an extensible platform that users can interact with in creative ways. So maybe we'd like the ability to scale only part of a webpage. Maybe we have an extension that allows us to quickly zoom in and out of a paragraph. Note that this is not completely theoretical, Firefox already lets users set minimum font sizes. If I set a minimum font-size of 14px, it doesn't matter if you say that your font-size is 8px, it will render at 14px -- but all of your bigger titles and headers will be unaffected. That's the kind of feature that works if browsers allow font-based zooming, and pages are built to accommodate that, but that is impossible to do if the only way we can resize a page is with full-page zooming.
  • mtone 6y ago
    What worries me is the testability. Too many variables, especially external unpredictable ones injected by browsers and user stylesheets, means accessibility testing combinations explode further than they already are. Full-page zoom - something I imagine was less common in the past for performance reason - is much more in line with "how the site was made, intended to layout as, and tested for." It's nice that the HN header bar doesn't grow on font-zoom, but it's hardly a killer feature (edit: and isn't even supported on my iPad where I'd want it). I always full-page zoom and was never bothered by it or even noticed it. But clearly half the web is broken for font zoom. I'd say don't fix it, leave it behind instead. Just like 14px doesn't really mean 14px anymore and that's ok.
    • eitland 6y ago
      > What worries me is the testability. This is why you should keep it simple :-) This is the web, not print publishing. Follow the rules, then to save save some time test with default settings in Firefox or Safari or iOS, the point is that the most usual problem I've seen the lastest few years are Chromeisms - non standard behavior that happens to work in Chrome.
• rhizome 6y ago
  >I just tried it on a few sites and it either doesn't change much/anything or breaks stuff This tells you you're visiting a site who's designer(s) don't want the user to control their browser. Ask them and dollars to donuts they'll treat it like the "doctor, it hurts when I do this" joke. Look at the vitriol in the comments here, there is unmistakeable antipathy toward the user. Nobody is going to say they pride themselves on a user-hostile approach to web design, but a duck is still a duck and the vast majority of designers are still going to think in terms of pixel-perfect. "When you're slapped you'll take it and like it." --Sam Spade